


An Inexplicable Occurrence of Tentacles

by ignipes



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance, Stargate Atlantis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-03
Updated: 2007-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-22 02:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a lot of things John hates about his job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Inexplicable Occurrence of Tentacles

There are a lot of things John hates about his job. He hates the Wraith. He hates the Replicators. He hates losing people. He hates it when villagers who have only just worked their way up to inventing gunpowder shoot at his team. He hates turning into a giant scaly insect. (It hasn't happened again--yet--but John is nothing if not a pessimist when it comes to turning into giant scaly insects.)

But most of all, John hates debriefing Major Bryar's gate team.

He peeks through his fingers cautiously. To his dismay, Atlantis and his office and the scientist before him have not vanished while he was hiding.

"So you decided to go _into_ the cave," John says. It's not really a question. If there is a cave and Major Bryar's team is anywhere on the same planet, they are going to explore it, no matter how unwise that course of action might seem to impartial observers. Or to their commanding officer, who has expressly forbidden them from exploring caves on at least three separate occasions. John asks slowly, "Did you have a reason for going into the cave?"

"Well, yes," Dr. Way says. He has the grace to look at least a little bit chagrined, but he's so fidgety even when he's perfectly calm that it's hard to tell. "I wanted a closer look at the carvings around the entrance, because I'd never seen anything like them before. The writing was Ancient, or close to Ancient, like maybe if Ancient was crossed with Dravidian scripts, but not exactly that because there are no Dravidian languages in the Pegasus galaxy, although we have found root languages that might be distantly related and it _looked_ like that, but the interesting part was the symbology accompanying the writing was more similar to what we've found in Wraith technology, but it was primitive and simplified almost like--"

John holds up a hand. "Right. So you went into the cave to look at the cave paintings."

"Carvings," Way corrects petulantly. "They were carvings."

"Carvings."

Carvings, paintings, John doesn't really care if Dr. Way was studying Wraith sidewalk chalk, he just wants to know how three of his men--well, two and a half, because Dr. Iero is pretty small--ended up in the infirmary with what Dr. Keller referred to as "an inexplicable occurrence of tentacles." The way she'd said it makes John wonder if there are, in fact, explicable occurrences of tentacles nobody on Atlantis has told him about.

"What did you find inside the cave?" John asks.

"Well," Dr. Way begins thoughtfully.

John winces; he can't help himself. Debriefing Major Bryar's team with three-fourths of the team missing always takes, paradoxically, about four times longer than it should, because Dr. Way can ramble for hours about the nesting patterns of vampire bats before admitting that no, actually, the vampire bats did not affect the mission in any way, he just thought they were pretty cool. (The older Dr. Way, that is. John has never heard the younger Dr. Way say more than ten words at a time, especially not since he's been banned from gate travel for earning the dubious distinction of being the first person on the expedition to blow up a defunct Ancient outpost in what all present swear was nothing more than an unfortunate toaster accident.)

"I mean," John says before Way can get going, "what did you find inside the cave that made three-fourths of your team spontaneously grow tentacles?"

"Um." Dr. Way shifts his weight. "I don't... I'm not really sure how that happened."

John knows he's lying. Dr. Way is literally the worst liar in the entire Pegasus Galaxy, which is normally more entertaining than it is troublesome (especially during Tuesday night poker games). But John's patience is wearing thin, there are two and a half men with _tentacles_ down in the infirmary, and everybody else on base is down sneaking a look around the hospital curtains and laughing while he's stuck in his office. He hopes Rodney at least gets pictures.

"Way," John says, in that slow, friendly, we're-all-buddies-here voice he usually reserves for moments right before shooting somebody or launching a nuclear weapon, "tell me about the tentacles so we can try to _fix_ the tentacles. Do you really want your team to be stuck with tentacles forever?"

"No," Dr. Way sighs.

John tries to hide his relief. (He was a little bit afraid the answer would be, "Well, _maybe_ , think of the possibilities," because Don't Ask, Don't Tell is one thing, but John trusts his sanity to the more specific policy of Don't Ever, Ever, Ever Ask What Way and Iero Do In Their Spare Time, and Shoot Them If They Try To Tell You.) "What happened?" John asks. "What was in the cave?"

Dr. Way fidgets for a little bit longer, then finally says, "There was an altar. In the cave, I mean. It wasn't really a very big cave, so we didn't have to go far into it." He looks a little hopeful at this, as though John is less likely to banish his team to the Planet of the Toothy Green Monkeys for disobeying the no-cave-exploration order only a little bit.

"What kind of altar?"

"A stone altar," Dr. Way says. "It was covered with the carvings too. There's no ocean on that planet."

John blinks at the non sequitur. "Okay. No ocean."

"We orbited the planet in the 'jumper before we landed," Way explains, "and there is definitely no ocean. It's all desert, and Frank says it looks like it has been for a long time, millions of years."

"What does this have to do with--"

"But all the carvings," Way goes on, completely heedless of the fact that he is interrupting his commanding office, "are aquatic images. Ocean animals. Squid and octopus mostly--except, not _really_ squid and octopus, because they don't look quite the same, and there was definitely one that had _wings_ as well, and, I mean, I try not to read too much into things and jump to conclusions--"

Another blatant lie--Dr. Way jumps to conclusions so often Rodney has threatened to buy him a skipping rope--but John lets this one slide.

"--but if you have a carving of a creature with wings on its back and tentacles on its _face_ , and it's surrounded by carvings of an entire army of octopus-type creatures, it does make me wonder..."

John stares. "No." Pauses. "Really?"

"We live in the lost city of Atlantis," Way points out, flapping his hands grandly at the city around them. "Who's to say there aren't--or weren't--something like the Elder Things--"

"Okay, okay." John sits back in his chair. "Let's try to stay on track, all right? Get back to the tentacles."

"Oh, right. The tentacles." Dr. Way laughs, high-pitched and a little nervous, and says, "Well, there were these grooves on the altar, right? Like, I dunno, troughs for draining sacrificial blood or something--or maybe sacrificial slime, or ooze, or whatever the creatures had, because we can't know for sure they had blood. Between the grooves there were these protrusions that looked a little like buttons, and Frank had the idea that maybe they _were_ buttons and he tried to push them--" He breaks off abruptly. "Colonel Sheppard? Are you okay?"

John says, his face buried in the stack of papers on his desk, "Fine. Go on."

"Um. Are you sure?"

When John finally snaps and declares himself His Highness the Royal Emperor and Grand Poohbah of the Whole Entire Pegasus Galaxy, his first imperial decree is going to be that Dr. Frank Iero is never allowed to have any ideas at all, ever again, until the very end of time, forever.

"Yes, I'm sure." He looks up and rubs his forehead. "So Iero pushed the buttons." Again, not really a question. If there is a button--especially a big red button with DO NOT PUSH written on it, but all other buttons will suffice--Dr. Iero is going to push it.

"Well, yeah," Dr. Way says, "but his hand kind of got stuck--"

"Stuck? His hand? How the hell--" There are some times, John knows, when it's safer for a commanding office not to ask. Like that time Major Bryar's team returned from P3X-297 and reported that the reigning warlord had demanded a princess's hand in marriage in exchange for their lives. ("You don't have a princess on your team, Major Bryar." "No, sir." "Then how did you--" "Dr. Way volunteered, sir." "And the warlord didn't--" "No, sir." "Do I really want to know?" "Definitely not, sir.")

He didn't ask then, and he's not going to ask now. "No. Never mind. I don't want to know. Just... just go on."

"So Bob and Ray went to pull him off, and I guess they ended up touching it too."

"That's all they did? Touch it?"

"Yes," Dr. Way says. "I was making sketches, so..."

"So you didn't touch it." John also doesn't ask why he was making sketches rather than simply taking pictures; considering the damage his brother can do with a toaster, John doesn't want to encourage Dr. Way to use dangerous technological items, like cameras.

"No, I didn't." Way looks a little miserable. John supposes he probably thinks he ought to be bedridden and tentacled in solidarity with his teammates. "They weren't even real buttons. Nothing else happened."

And the worst part is, John believes him. This is exactly why he hates debriefing Major Bryar's team; there's always _something_. Major Bryar is a good leader, and Lieutenant Toro is so damn likable that even planets who have refused to trade with visitors for hundreds of years welcome him with open arms once they stop being afraid of his hair (which is, incidentally, very much against regulations, but for some reason nobody under John's command ever speaks up about non-regulation hairstyles). Drs. Way and Iero are a little (okay, a lot) weird, but all scientists are a little (a lot) weird so that's to be expected.

The four of them make a good team. They just have a... knack. For certain situations. Atypical problems. One might even go so far as to call them _unique predicaments_.

"Okay," John says. He presses his fingers to his temples briefly. "We'll send a team back to the planet to see what they can learn about this... altar-thing. I need you to tell Zelenka everything you know about it, and--"

John's radio crackles. Dr. Keller's voice comes through: "Colonel Sheppard, I think we have some good news here."

"Report, Dr. Keller."

"It looks like..." There's a brief pause, and John swears he can hear her _giggling_ , for crying out loud. "It looks like the tentacles are shrinking."

John thinks about this and asks with no small amount of morbid curiosity, "How small?"

"Down to nothing, eventually," she says. Another pause, another surreptitious giggle. "As far as I can tell, the tentacles are the only parts that are shrinking. Everything else appears to be completely normal. I think they're going to be okay."

Dr. Way lets out a tiny little squeak and turns on his heels so fast he's no more than a blur racing out of John's office.

"Well, sure, you may be dismissed, Dr. Way," John says to his retreating back. He stands up and tells Dr. Keller, "I'm on my way down."

Before he even makes it to the door, the gate engages with the familiar _whoosh_ and his radio sounds again. This time it's the gateroom: Captain Trohman's team is coming in six hours early, and they're coming in hot.

Some days John really hates his job.


End file.
